When are they Implementing the Charm Nerf?

[enjchanter]

If youre not charm soloing as an enchanter, then thats just ape behavior tbf

[Botten]

The real problem is Enchanters are soloing a high stat gear drop dungeon like Chardok.

While it is great to get an item for CHEAP on the market from this dungeon; it absolutely sucks to take a group here with their trains, their claim to pit for KM and the zone picked dry of named by this type of toxic soloing (often take multiple camps).

Duo enchanters shouldn't be able to take King after illusion bugging through the door.

Charm on live was nerfed after Legacy of Steel managed to take down Avatar easily sending wave after wave of charmed mobs. Pretty much trivializing it. They got a warning for that and Charm was changed.

I don't see any reason charm can not be fine tuned again for P99.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by enjchanter [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If youre not charm soloing as an enchanter, then thats just ape behavior tbf

I agree. So either the vast majority of Enchanter players on live were apes (but players of every other class knew how to play that class just as well as they do on P99), or ... our emulator isn't emulating charm properly.

[Tann]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I agree. So either the vast majority of Enchanter players on live were apes (but players of every other class knew how to play that class just as well as they do on P99), or ... our emulator isn't emulating charm properly.

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Elizondo]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I agree. So either the vast majority of Enchanter players on live were apes (but players of every other class knew how to play that class just as well as they do on P99), or ... our emulator isn't emulating charm properly.

They just didn't play the class back then the way they are played now

Good enchanters back then could lock down trains. They mezed and buffed.

Charming wasn't a thing back in Classic Era. At least it wasn't how the class was generally played. Sure, there may have been a few one offs here and there but chanters back then stacked INT. Not CHA.

Chanter play on P99 was a revolution that completely changed the way the class is played. It amazes me nobody understands this. Look at the way good chanters play. You're endlessly swapping out multiple spells per fight. The way the class is played has simply evolved. It's tools have been maximized. It's not easy though. It's a chore. A lazy enchanter is a dead enchanter.

I see a lot of players dump coin into gearing chanters thinking they are going to walk into a dungeon God Mode. They get wrecked and lose interest because they read the forums and thought they could solo insane mobs with ease. It's a slog. You don't even feel like a chanter until level 29. 1-12 is absolutely horrible. You get your first charm at 12 and besides a few select camps where you pull pairs it's not great.

I dunno, the people in this thread calling for chanters to be nerfed don't seem like they've ever played the class at a high level. Charm is not the only reason chanters can take out tough mobs. It's also rune and slow. They can rune their pet and slow it's target. No other class has anything close to that.

Charm shouldn't be nerfed. Players just got better and more clever.

I prefer necro charming anyways. Way more fun.

[Jimjam]

I think the prevalence of shared cleric bots and community ports makes a difference. Very easy to 96% rez and move on.

An enchanter pays for its own slot through the dps increase of haste.

Even today I’d rather an underlevelled or unmotivated enc focuses on buffs than overstretches themself and die repeatedly. That attitude was way more common back in 99. These days there is a lot of pressure to maintain full buffs, slow, cc and keep a charm pet and that is certainly an unclassic social pressure.

[Troxx]

You mostly didn’t see enchanters charming a lot on classic because we didn’t have 5-10 years of kunark followed by velious forever more there after. Expansions rolled out quickly, charming did eventually get nerfed and EQ moved on. There were a few places where ench charm (albeit super dangerous) made otherwise brutal encounters doable. I can’t remember the name of the trial but think that run in Gates of Discord you has to do with a single group with the ass-beater mob that could and would trash a defensive warrior that wasn’t raid geared to the 9s. Having a charmed dog thingy meant you only had to survive the brutality for a few short seconds because the hasted dog would rip it in half.

But a fair bit of the time the dog would break charm and eat the ench before anyone in the group could react. Winning combo was a Ranger (am3/EQ, trueshot, snare and harmony), an ench, a cleric, a defensive warrior … and then you could help carry 2 guild mates through each run for their one time win..

Remember that on classic timeline less than 1/5 or 1/6 of any given server’s population had a single level 60 main character halfway through Luclin. Not only were we all relative noobs but less was known about game mechanics or games at large. I played in highschool on a dial up and we only had one phone line so we’re talking an hour here vs there. I think my highest was maybe 20 before I went off to college in 2001 and had broadband. I played a Ranger then and remember not getting to 60 and having TS/AM3 until at least halfway through the Luclin timeline.

Charming was possible in this era on live but you never saw people doing it much because
-we were all noobs who didn’t know better
-most had bad connections
-the vast majority of any given server was low level
-expansions dropped routinely that eventually pulled the plug on the mechanic

Had it been known or widely used, I’m confident Verant would have nerfed it.

I’m NOT advocating a nerf mind you, but thems the facts

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Elizondo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

They just didn't play the class back then the way they are played now

Good enchanters back then could lock down trains. They mezed and buffed.

Charming wasn't a thing back in Classic Era. At least it wasn't how the class was generally played. Sure, there may have been a few one offs here and there but chanters back then stacked INT. Not CHA.

100% agree, except I've dug into classic sources and Enchanters absolutely did charm back in classic ... they were just the very clear minority. Plenty of others tried charming, but found that it was too risky, and grouping was much faster XP.

Originally Posted by Elizondo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Chanter play on P99 was a revolution that completely changed the way the class is played.

See, this is where I get lost. If this was the same game as back in '99 it'd be impossible to "change how the class is played". Literally more than ten times as many Enchanters played on live as do here. It makes zero logical sense that ten times as many players wouldn't figure out how to play the class, but a few geniuses at P99 would.

The "Occam's razor" (ie. simplest) answer isn't that 1/10th of the players magically learned how to play better than 10x that number on live, playing for two years ... it's that the emulator's rules changed from live. And again, no other class magically changed how it's played the way Enchanters (and to a lesser extent other charm classes) have.

[pasi]

Originally Posted by Troxx [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I can’t remember the name of the trial but think that run in Gates of Discord you has to do with a single group with the ass-beater mob that could and would trash a defensive warrior that wasn’t raid geared to the 9s. Having a charmed dog thingy meant you only had to survive the brutality for a few short seconds because the hasted dog would rip it in half.

Probably talking about Tipt or Vxed. Though charm was certainly abused in other zones, those two had a big safety net.

To piggyback on the rest of your points, the majority of even the raiding playerbase was not 60 / level-capped until Luclin. Even the hardcore guilds were mostly composed of sub60s in Velious. Let alone 60s with their rare Kunark spells. Level differences make a huge difference in terms of landing spells, attacks, etc.

Take a look at the original casters realm epic guides, you'll see guides recommending multiple groups of players for low to mid 50s epic mobs that easily are soloable/duoable/trioable in Kunark era.

Project1999 is going on 13 years old. To put that into the timeline of EQ Live, EQ would be well into it's 18th expansion: Veil of Alaris. And even with P1999, there was years of optimization/metagaming that carried into 2009. We knew bards could AE kite and outlevel anyone despite a large exp penalty. We knew 3 50 mages and a cleric could kill Nagafen. We knew whirl was broken. We knew you could just use hoops to trivialize any 32K HP mob. We knew you could use mallets in lieu of waiting for a tank to establish aggro. Take all that and add 13 more years of people figuring shit out.

1999-2001 was a completely different era of gaming. The vast majority of players were terrible in comparison to private servers. You won't get the genie back in the bottle here. You're playing an emulator of something 20 years old with mostly people who have a decade or more experience. Give these same people countless guides, videos, wikis/spoilers, whatever. Contrast that with a player base of varying levels of engagement (i.e. more casuals checking out what their friends are playing), a max of 1-2 years experience, and prima strategy guides.

This isn't anything unique to P99/Everquest. The same shit occurred with World of Warcraft. You had optimized players doing 300% of what they were doing in 2004-2006. Several years past the infamous Science of War (~2003) rant expressing nostalgia for the era of EQ before the powergaming/optimization.

[loramin]

Look, I totally understand (and agree with!) the argument that we play differently than live players did. The thing about us being stuck at level 60, while Live had Luclin and future expansions, is absolutely true, and does make us more "top heavy".

Likewise, our wiki is better than Allakhazam, Caster's Realm, etc. ... but really, not by that much, and certainly not in relevant ways for this dicussion. Like yes, our wiki has the exact mob loc, and will even show you with a red x on a map where that loc is; Allakhazam didn't have such data for most mobs. But every class had their own forum, with tons of people (again, live had more than 10x the players we have) discussing every last detail of their class, so it's 100% false to say "oh no one in live knew what they were doing".

Enchanters on live knew about levels and charisma. They may not have been as certain of their exact effects, but they absolutely understood how to charm (and I can point you toward a wealth of evidence ... just the Caster's Realm guides on the Wayback Machine alone should be enough). They chose not too (or at least most did; again some did solo charm). And what no one has been able to explain is why only Enchanters (and to a lesser extent Druids/Necros/Bards) make different choices here.

No one is saying "oh those live Warriors didn't know how to solo" ... or well, actually, they did [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] There were long, passionate arguments about how binding wounds in combat was totally classic, and people just didn't know how to play their class on live ... until it was proven that combat bind wounds was nonsense, and removed from here.

But with stuff like 25+ mob kites and combat bind wounds being removed here, every class plays fundamentally the same as they did on live. Warriors group, or solo poorly. Same for Clerics. Necromancers and Mages solo (or group, if they feel like it). All just like live.

Charming is the only thing fundamentally different from Live here: Enchanters are the only class that was predominantly a group class on Live, but is now predominantly a solo class here.

So, I'm not saying to remove charm: if no one could charm solo here, we wouldn't have a good emulator either! All I'm saying is, somehow, some way (and there are much smarter people than me with more details to offer) charm should be somewhat more risky ... like it was on Live.